Contrary to our dearest wishes, people generally don’t come to our websites just to “click around” and see what’s there. They’re on a mission to find or do something – either specifically or vaguely defined. Information scent is that which sets expectations for their ability to find or do it.
It is a brand’s promise to them that they can find or do what the object or labels represent.
The good news is that, for savvy and diligent brands, this is a great opportunity to set high expectations and exceed them – thus, building a strong brand reputation.
The bad news is that, without proper planning, it’s unlikely to happen on its own. Brands, Web designers, and experience planners need to know the principles that will enable them to build strong brands by generating a strong information scent and delivering on the expectations they set.
What is information scent?
(Nerd alert: Instruction of theory follows)
To help interaction designers understand how to make information more findable, back in 1993, some researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center developed a theory called “information foraging,” which suggests that there are important similarities between how animals gather food and how humans collect information online.
The concept of “information scent” came out of this theory, which provided some useful principles to follow when building online experiences.
Abstraction: The stink bomb of information scent
Everything is alike at the appropriate level of abstraction.
For instance, dogs and cats are distinct animals. However, dogs and cats are both “pets.” Dogs, cats, and horses are “domesticated animals.” Dogs, cats, horses, and mice are “animals.” Dogs, cats, horses, mice, and pitchforks are “things you might find on a ranch.”
The more abstract the category, the more difficult it is to predict exactly what the label means. Hence, in (sadly) typical website parlance, “resources” and “tools” may be too abstract to be useful. By themselves, they provide no information scent. “Resources,” as a label, may just as easily be about water, coal, and oil as it is about links, support documents, or helpful people.
As the Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick tell us, “Abstraction is the kiss of death in any situation where you need to stand out.” And in a space that is abundant with information (like the Web), you need to stand out.
Don’t be obsessed with click-counts
Once upon a time, savvy Web designers believed that websites should adhere to something they called the “Three-Click Rule,” which, as the name suggests, stated that every piece of content on a site should be no more than three clicks away.
The problem, however, isn’t the number of clicks. It’s the degree of certainty users have that they can find the information they need – that they can accurately predict what will happen when they click something.
It’s very rarely a good idea to add unnecessary clicks.* But often adding an intermediate step in a given process can actually make things more findable.
Otherwise everyone would just take their site map and turn it into their home page.
* Surprisingly enough, this white paper from Human Factors International suggests adding extra clicks can sometimes better support the goal of the site and fulfill the desires of the users.
Turn your web pages into billboards
“The goal should be for each page to be self-evident, so that just by looking at it the average user will know what it is and how to use it.” – Steve Krug, Don’t Make Me Think
Following Krug’s advice sometimes means turning three painfully laborious clicks into four quick and mindless ones. Within reasonable constraints, if the information scent is strong enough that users are supremely confident they will find the information they need by clicking on something, as long as the site delivers regularly, they won’t even remember how many clicks it took them to get there.
They get frustrated only when they struggle – either deciding what or where to click, or finding out that what they clicked didn’t give them what they expected.
You could provide instructions, but while in foraging mode, people don’t want to stick around and read instructions, so your interface must convey what you would otherwise use words to communicate.
People want to get to the meat of what brought them to your site in the first place. So they won’t read at first. They’ll scan. They’ll scan by looking for cues that indicate to them where they must go (or what they must read to find out).
Krug wrote of a framework that takes advantage of the typical scanning behavior of users: If people simply scan pages like they scan billboards (until they find what they came for), when necessary and possible, treat the pages like billboards.
Besides creating clear, consistent labels, here are Krug’s guidelines for doing just that:
1. Create a clear visual hierarchy on each page
Caption: As “ugly” as his site design is, Jakob Nielsen’s articles at useit.com are ridiculously easy to scan and read because he makes use of good visual hierarchy.
2. Take advantage of conventions
Caption: Many of the video interface elements we see and recognize everywhere on the Web today are conventions because YouTube became popular. Many of them were recognizable because they were recycled from video players that were manufactured for decades prior to YouTube’s manifestation.
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas
Caption: USA Today’s website has a lot going on — even on content pages like this one — but the various areas are clearly defined for what they are. Navigation is navigation, headlines are headlines, body text is body text and so forth. Separation between areas aids in navigation and consumption.
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable
Caption: Buttons can come in all shapes and sizes. You can perform a few tests with others to determine if a button appears clickable. But if you do nothing else, look a few inches in front of any given design element (such as a button). If you can still tell that the object is clickable, then it probably will appear clickable to others.
5. Minimize noise
Caption: In spite of providing access to thousands of programs, Hulu.com does an outstanding job of keeping things simple on their homepage.
Live it, love it, give it a pleasant aroma
The main goal of following these principles is to ensure people who come to a site looking for information can find it.
Abstract labels or design features can get in the way of this goal. They are said to have a weak information scent.
Clear labels with good visual hierarchy, familiar or recognizable design elements that aren’t too cluttered typically provide a strong information scent.
It isn’t always possible, given the constraints of any particular circumstance, to achieve 100% clarity in appearance or labels.
However, knowing the principles of information scent and their potential benefit, with proper planning and testing, can give you a greater degree of certainty that your online presence will successfully support your brand promise.
Remember to plan for this important aspect of communication.
Related
Top 10 UX Myths (Hat tip to David Armano)
Email Messaging That Works
Brian Kress
Merritt Colaizzi, publisher of the successful SmartBrief email newsletters, takes her experience in developing emails across several industries and collects some copywriting tips for us on how we might build more effective emails.
The Social Media Revolution in Under 5 Minutes
John Keehler
“Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution? Welcome to the World of Socialnomics.”
Boring vs. Normal
Luke Lancaster
To promote its new model of laptop, Toshiba is having 11 average people uploading video to tell consumers how they use the product – rather than have the computer maker publicize it themselves. In the user-generated content (UGC) campaign Boring vs. Normal, the two American towns will compete to prove which town represents the bigger misnomer.
What if Craigslist Was Redesigned?
Jeff Whang
As a feature in Wired Magazine’s cover story this month, “Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess,” the publisher asked leading web designers and information architects how they would redesign Craigslist to work better (a site that’s essentially unchanged since 2001.)
Yahoo! + MSN Search – What You Need To Know
Derek Louden
A recent 10-year search deal struck between Yahoo! and MSN will have implications for both search users and marketers alike in the coming years. While major changes aren’t expected for the next 12 to 18 months, it’s useful to know the top-level details of the deal so we can know what to expect. While not exactly a “merger”, this article clearly articulates what we can expect from this “agreement”.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: The Buzz | Email This Post
Bowers and Wilkins is a British hi-fi speaker company, and one of the most recognized names in high-performance speakers. They claim a constant pursuit of perfection, and B&W goes to great lengths (sometimes lengths that will set you back $60,000 for a pair) to ensure that their speakers make a “transparent reproduction of recorded sound.” In order to engage the audiophiles of the world, even those who may not be in the market for a $10,000 set of speakers, they needed to choose an alternate path to advertising for engaging their audience.
We had an interesting discussion around B&W at last week’s Likemind that explored their use of Twitter. Rather than using their Twitter account to announce product launches, distribute press releases, or push deals, B&W uses Twitter to present interesting articles about sound and ask its followers for their input on the debates of the industry.
As evidenced by their Twitter presence, they noticed an important commonality about their audience, that those who will want the best in speaker design are also looking to participate in the discussion and future of sound. And they don’t stop meeting this insight about their audience at Twitter, but have created their own society, dubbed “The Society of Sound,” that survives to instigate big sound conversations and share in the love for music. With fellows including Peter Gabriel and others successful in the industry and passionate in the pursuit of pure sound, the Society of Sound is a powerful testament to B&W.
From both their Twitter profile and their Society of Sound, B&W’s messaging strategy, rather than discussing the merits of their product, focuses around curating content that reinforces their brand values while delivering practical benefit to their prospects. This approach from B&W is an example of a brand that wants to mean something very specific to a select group of people rather than everything to everyone. The brand-as-curator mindset may help find platforms to communicate that are both powerful in message as well as useful to their end customer.
Around a year ago (and a spike around two years before that), the marketing blogosphere was enamored by the idea of brand utility. Brand utility had been summed up by a single epiphany from Bob Greenberg at R/GA, where he became certain that brand culture would move away from the metaphorical (as embodied in the TV spot and its interactive extensions) and toward the useful. In an approach of brand utility, said brand would forgo the common approach to advertising focused directly around benefits and instead drift towards using media to improve the usefulness of its product. Product and messaging become one in the same.
Does the B&W example qualify as brand utility? Does the utility of the brand need to relate directly with the product that you’re trying to sell, or can it simply be a different, useful set of content that reinforces your values?
Either way, B&W shows us a path for deep engagement and clear communication with our customers:
1. Learn about your target. Answer the question: what is a shared passion between your brand and your target? What is a discussion that they’re already having that you can contribute to?
2. Curate content around that discussion. Twitter seems to be a useful option given its ability for quick distribution of content. Articles, comments, questions, and branded content each have a place in the feed. Scale up your engagement by incorporating content from thought leaders, exclusive content, and even branded forums.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
35 Best iPhone Apps of the Year
John Keehler
Whether you prefer games, time wasters or practical applications, this list includes some of the best free and paid applications developed this year for the iPhone.
Why Twitter?
Jeff Whang
A popular blogger writes an article about completely believing in the Twitter platform but explains why he believes tweets are fundamentally valueless. And in the process naturally gets 214 comments and counting about the topic. So take a read and see if you identify more with the article or with those in the comments who explain why they tweet and why they do have value.
The Battle for Search Results: Wikipedia vs… the AP?
Brian Kress
Wikipedia is often crowned king of search by bloggers and industry experts. It has gained status by becoming an integral part of how we share and gain knowledge today. The Associated Press thinks that because of its vast member network – and other possible strategies, it can challenge Wikipedia for the top spot. This post discusses their approach.
Twitter Has 40% “Pointless Babble”… Like Your Conversations
John Keehler
“Turn all of your utterances over to an analytics firm so that they can code everything that you’ve said. I think that you’ll be lucky if only 40% of what you say constitutes pointless babble.”
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: The Buzz | Email This Post
“There’s an app for that.” In the past few years, Apple’s iPhone has popularized the term “app” among the masses. And these days, brands are beginning to find innovative ways to deliver compelling content or sponsor compelling content as it relates to their brand.
While much of this activity is happening on Apple’s iPhone using the App Store platform, the space is about to get big. Very big.
Growth in Smartphone Market
Before we get into apps, consider the exploding smartphone category in general. Smartphones account for only 11% of the world’s mobile handsets and is still less than 20% in the U.S.; however, in a Gartner report that just came out on Wednesday, worldwide mobile phone sales decreased 6% in Q2 2009 from Q2 2008 – in the same time period, smartphone sales surpassed 40 million, representing a 27 percent increase.
And analyst firm Ovum predicts more future growth for the smartphone category: it’s expected to continue by nearly 20 per cent over the next five years, with smartphones accounting for nearly 30 per cent of the market by 2014.
In the same Gartner report, surging iPhone sales helped Apple increase market share among smartphone makers in the second quarter, jumping to 13.3% from 2.8% a year ago. Apple is now closing in on BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion, which has 18.7% share and ranked second in the smartphone category. Nokia, the category leader has 45%, but that’s down 3% from a year ago. These numbers also do not take into account the iPhone 3GS launch that happened a few months ago. That’s expected to change things in a big way for Apple when those results come out later this year.
So we get it, smartphones are here to stay and are expected to grow market share considerably over the next few years. But what about the potential of apps?
Growth in Apps
In addition to the App Store, Google’s Android and Blackberry’s own app stores, as well as others like Palm and Nokia have all launched recently, some just in the past few months. As you might already know from the ads Apple has run, the App Store vastly outnumbers the other two by huge margins.
Apple app store:
35,000 apps
Android market:
3,200 apps
Blackberry app world:
1,000 apps
But with recent Apple app store controversy combined with the growth in adoption and use of these other stores like Android, Blackberry and Palm, the entire category is exploding with growth. An industry analyst expects that smartphone downloads from all app stores will reach 6.67 billion in 2014.
Apps for Advertisers
So as marketers, consider how your brand can work in this space, and not just on the iPhone. Ask your agency to provide their POV on if apps make sense for their brand and on which platform. If you have a target that you think might skew toward a platform other than the iPhone, do the research and find out which platform they do use more often. Then look at what kinds of apps make the most sense for your target. Most of the buzz in the app space has been around games and entertainment apps – expect that to change as these other app stores continue to grow and more business users adopt the iPhone.
And be inspired by what the trailblazers have done in the space – explore the successes of Kraft’s iFood Assistant app and google what Levi’s Dockers did with their shakeable ad and Charmin’s sponsorship of the SitOrSquat app. Or go out and find your own!
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Research | Email This Post
Twitter Isn’t for Teens
John Keehler
Nielsen study confirms that Twitter’s growth is perhaps the most impressive because it’s done so without children, teens and young adults. In fact, 84% of the Twitter audience is over the age of 25.
Deposit Your Checks Using Your…iPhone?
Jeff Whang
Many of you have been to ATMs recently that eschew the deposit envelope and simply scan your checks in, reading the amount printed on the check. Well, USAA has taken this technology to a much bolder level by allowing customers to take a photo of the check they’d like to deposit using their iPhone, and send it to the bank via the USAA app. Void the physical check and they’re done.
America Wakes Up To: “You’ve Got Mail”
Brian Kress
According to web traffic studies, Internet users are making breakfast take a back seat to their online life. The ease of grabbing the bedside cell phone or laptop has given people that much-needed injection of connectedness that they’ve missed out on for that 7 or so hours of slumber. Another routine falls victim to technology’s darn convenience.
Ben & Jerry’s “Flips Out” on Facebook
John Keehler
For the release of their “flipped out” sundaes, the folks at Ben & Jerry’s created a Facebook application that allows nothing more than “a quick way to input words, flip them upside down, and copy and paste them anywhere, but the transfigured text is already making waves with flipped out status updates being posted to both Facebook and Twitter.”
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: The Buzz | Email This Post
Twitter seems to be all the buzz in recent months in the online space, with marketers trying to determine how best to utilize this new vehicle. There have been quite a few unique executions as advertisers are feeling their way around this tool. Let’s take a look at how some brands are utilizing this space:
In April, right before tax day, Turbo Tax decided to use their twitter profile as an open forum for users to submit tax questions and have their tax professionals reply back to them. In order to promote this feature, Turbo Tax launched a search campaign which featured the 5 most recent tweets as their AdSense ads. While it’s a great idea in theory to raise awareness of their Twitter service (and eventually gain followers), the execution was a bit questionable. In this instance the tweets are conversational rather than content-specific. When viewed in an environment other than Twitter, there can be a substantial disconnect in the conversation. The example below is a snippet of the tweets from April 13th, prime tax time. As you can see, what makes sense via the company’s tweet stream may come across as irrelevant to the user when viewed in a search environment.
Another example of how companies are using this new space is with Land Rover. Leading up to the New York Auto Show this year, Land Rover prompted consumers to join the conversation via their hashtag – #LRNY. The messaging was found in out of home environments and instructed users to either follow the brand on Twitter or contribute to the conversation. Did it work? Considering the effort was practically free, to get such a high volume of users interacting with your brand is a huge success. During the week of the auto show, Land Rover saw a 62.5% increase in conversations involving the brand. Giving users this outlet to offer praise, feedback, and criticism is invaluable to future brand strategies and marketing efforts.
A final example and hand’s down the best execution I’ve seen to date is Best Buy’s new twelpforce campaign. Best Buy is currently running spots promoting a new service they’ve launched. The spots do a great job of visually explaining how the service works. Users are directed to the website at the end of the spot to engage with twelpforce. Via the twitter feed, users submit their tech-related questions and Best Buy employees have signed up to answer them to the best of their ability. This initiative is still in its infancy as it just launched a few weeks ago. At last check, the twelpforce page had over 6,900 followers. In the age of automated everything, I think customers will appreciate being able to correspond with an actual person to get advice and questions answered.
Marketers are still testing the waters and trying to determine the best way to use this new social media platform. We are regularly asked by clients whether they should be on twitter and what they should be doing in this space. While there are many facets to consider, I would say to first establish if it makes sense with your marketing strategy. Then determine if you’re able to execute an initiative utlizing online media, offline media or a combination of both in a unique and engaging way. There has to be a clear purpose behind the effort and not just a desire to play in this latest arena. As advertisers become more comfortable with the space, it will definitely be an area to watch.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Twitter | Email This Post
Your 6 o’clock News Wherever You Are…On YouTube
Jeff Whang
YouTube has recently created a “News Near You” feature that senses your location and serves up relevant videos. With nearly 200 news outlets having already agreed to post their videos on YouTube and split the ad revenue, it could in time create a customized local newscast on the fly.
Pizza Hut’s iPhone App Tops 100,000 Users in Two Weeks
Brian Kress
When Pizza Hut launched its iPhone app two weeks ago, they risked getting lost in the wash of the other 65,000 in the App Store. The risk paid off, though, when within two weeks of its launch they reached 100,000 users by incorporating an easy to use ordering system with some fun games while you wait for your pizza to be delivered. Check out the video in the link for the full breakdown.
Online Marketing Case Study: Land’s End Fantasy Backpack Creator
John Keehler
Just in time for back-to-school, this great site for Land’s End is the most fun you will ever have shopping for backpacks. It’s a great case study on how interactivity and surprise can make an engaging online experience.
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: The Buzz | Email This Post
A client recently approached us with a great question: “Are any brands using social media to directly drive sales?” We thought the answer was worth sharing with you, our readers. The answer is, of course, yes… but for many of these pioneering brands, success still hangs in the balance. Here’s a short list of a few we think are worth paying attention to:
1.) Dell Outlet Twitter
You may be familiar with Dell’s incredibly successful Twitter program. The @DellOutlet Twitter profile has generated over $3 million in sales for Dell in a short period of time. One of the secrets to their success is the use of more coupons exclusive to Twitter, which has driven their followers to retweet the deals and made them one of the top 50 most followed brands on Twitter. We’ll see more examples like this as companies implement unique coupon codes and tracking to see how Twitter is affecting sales.
2.) 1-800-Flowers Facebook Page
1-800-Flowers is one of the most recent brands to introduce e-commerce functionality on their Facebook Page. They’ve added a “Shop!” tab on the Facebook Page which allows visitors to browse products and purchase directly through Facebook. We’ll be following this closely, as there’s no indication that their very “traditional” approach to e-commerce will work on this new social media platform.
3.) Pizza Hut Facebook Application
Pizza Hut last year launched an application on Facebook that allows users to purchase a Pizza directly through Facebook. The application requires that you already be a registered user, as it ties into their existing online ordering system. Although the effort was launched in late 2008, there haven’t been any formal announcement of sales results from the application.
Although many of these efforts are still early, we continue to see new brands jump into the pursuit of sales through social media. One of the more interesting developments out there is the public testing Facebook has begun for a payment functionality that may drive even more brands to devise sales strategies related to Facebook. Whatever the case, we think it’s worth brands putting together a strategy to address the sales side of their social media efforts, in addition to their brand and loyalty strategies. We’ll be watching the space to see what lessons are being learned in this new sales frontier.
3 Comments | Trackback | Categories: 1000 Ft. POV | Email This Post
No Comments | Trackback | Categories: Planning, Testing, Tips and Tricks, Websites | Email This Post